“Why not? If the investment side of the company is interested enough in the weather to have a meteorologist on staff—”
“Four.”
His eyes widened. “You have four? Is that normal?”
“It’s normal for us.”
“So, why wouldn’t the sales force for the construction side of the company have an interest in what the weather is going to do?”
She frowned. “Well, of course they have an interest. I send my reports to them, too, but—What you’re suggesting is macabre, Jake.”
“What am I suggesting?”
“Are you a cop of some sort?” she demanded. “Only cops answer questions with questions.”
“Lawyers do, too. And I’m neither. Like I said, I’m a meteorologist.”
“A government one,” she pointed out.
He started to laugh. “So back to the topic at hand. I’m not suggesting anything macabre. I’m trying to think like a businessman. Predicting a firm’s business cycle is fairly standard practice, and if your business is cleaning up after stormy weather—You can’t be that naïve, Kate. I mean, Home Depot executives probably file into the boardroom for some serious high fives every June 1,” he replied with a shrug. “‘Yippity-doo-dah, it’s hurricane season again.’ Talk about having Christmas in July. And no one can blame them. It’s their business to sell plywood and blue tarps and nail guns, and hurricanes and floods and tornadoes help to drive up those sales. Wouldn’t they be interested in weather derivatives? And so would your company.”
“Our sister company. And, well, okay, I see your point, but we’re not a retail outfit.” She let out an exasperated breath. “Look, I don’t work too much with that side of the company. Like I said, I just send them my reports. I don’t actually generate anything specifically for them, nor does anyone on my staff. Besides, from what I understand, we usually have contracts in place ahead of time. More like, if something happens, we’ll be there to fix it, and in certain places, things always happen. Like the Gulf Coast and the southeastern seaboard. That’s good business.”
“True, but imagine if a company like yours had contracts in place to clean up coastal cities after storm damage and then, to maximize profits, put options on storms hitting them. It would make more money, wouldn’t it?”
She put her coffee on the table. The acid wasn’t sitting in her stomach as well as it normally did, and she had had about enough of this conversation. “Look, the Coriolis companies are routinely named as two of the best companies to work for, and Carter Thompson is a good guy. He runs a solid business and doesn’t get into all that gouging that happens with other companies, okay? Now either you quit bashing my company and we get back to discussing those storms or I’m out of here.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to bash your company. Forget what I said. And I thought you had a coffee date in a few minutes anyway.”
Damn. She blinked. “I lied,” she admitted. “It was an out in case you were some kind of weirdo or pain in the ass.”
His smile started in one corner of his mouth and wandered slowly to the other. “So I’m neither?”
She brushed a hair off her forehead nonchalantly. “The jury is still out on the latter.”
“Fair enough. Tell me about the storms and why you started looking at them.”
“Because, like I said, they got me into trouble. I called them. The traders made their deals. The deals went south. Well, some of the deals made money, but not the ones that relied on my forecasts. Anyway, I’m not paid to make mistakes, I’m paid to make accurate forecasts, and people noticed that I hadn’t achieved that goal,” she explained, ending with more than a little sarcasm in her voice.
“People?” he repeated.
She frowned. “Carter Thompson, the man who owns the company, apparently has me in his crosshairs. This paper evolved because I need to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “I still don’t know what happened. So now you answer some questions. Do you know what happened?”
Jake’s face got that closed look on it again and then he said, “What are you doing for lunch?”
CHAPTER 30
Friday, July 20, 10:40 A.M., Santa Rita, Yucatán
Peninsula, Mexico
Raoul kept his hand wrapped around the bottle of Coke and his eyes on the bar’s one television.
Carter’s gone blinking mad. He lifted the heavy glass bottle to his lips, trusting neither the allegedly clean glass sitting in front of him on the shabby wooden surface nor the ice that sat within it. The man was seriously expecting him to fly inside U.S. airspace some time in the next six and a half hours and zap the storm shortly thereafter.
Escalate the storm, my ass. As if I’d be able to get anywhere bloody near it.
It would be suicide.
While operating inside national borders was always risky, he and his crew were usually working in places where no one was paying much attention. But operating in the same airspace occupied by a Category 4 hurricane that was strolling up the coast of Florida was sheer lunacy. By definition, it was a place everyone was watching. Half a dozen U.S. weather agencies had their satellites trained on the area, as did, no doubt, American military and intelligence agencies. In addition to that, and much more to the point, the Air Force and the Navy had their storm watchers and Hurricane Hunters on patrol pretty much around the clock. There would be at least half a dozen bona fide reconnaissance planes already flying inside, above, through, and around the lady Simone. If any one of those pilots looked out the window and saw a plane that wasn’t visible on a radar screen, life as Raoul knew it would change rapidly and dramatically.
We’re going to bloody well leave it alone until it’s back over international waters.
He pushed the Coke to the side and signaled for a beer. It didn’t matter because he wasn’t flying anywhere today.
Friday, July 20, 6:45 P.M., DUMBO (Down Under the
Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn
Kate glanced at the clock on the front of her microwave oven. It was quarter to seven.
Damn it.
She hadn’t been in her apartment for more than twenty minutes, which was barely time to breathe, much less change her clothes and her mind-set, and she was already late. Not that dinner at her parents’ apartment had a critical start time, but these days anything could give her mother a reason to start nagging.
Tough.
After spending six hours on a train in the last two days, getting bitched at by Davis Lee and freaked out by Jake Baxter’s great smile and weird questions, there was no way Kate was going to deny herself a few minutes of private downtime. She lay down, blessedly naked and freshly showered, on the cool wood floor in the path of her window air conditioner’s air stream and breathed out.
Okay, I dropped the ball.
Not liking that serious look in his eyes, and not wanting to learn for sure that Jake had become a conspiracy nut and was working for some official-sounding think tank of crackpots, she’d refused his offer of lunch, citing her train schedule. Then she’d cabbed it over to Georgetown and shopped away the wiggy vibes he’d given her until it was time to get back to Union Station for the trip home. But the uneasiness their conversation had inspired still lingered, and she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to forget about it.
Something about Jake told her he wasn’t the type to indulge in crap theories. His end of the conversation, when she’d finally been able to get him to talk, revealed a hard-nosed approach to facts and a creative streak when it came to research. He’d been ROTC all during college, gone into the Marines after graduation, and come out an officer. And then got his Ph.D. in climatology.
Then again, the military and academia are hardly bastions of sound thinking. He could still be a crackpot.
Except that he’d asked intelligent questions instead of making political points or wild postulations—
She sat up and
grabbed the chirping phone off the coffee table, fully expecting it to be her mother checking to see if she’d left yet. If it was, she wouldn’t answer. But the number that came up began with 703.
Venting at a telemarketer bent on disturbing me might be a reasonable outlet. “Hello?”
“Kate?”
She went still, recognizing the voice. “Yes.”
“It’s Jake.”
Why didn’t I give him a fake number? “Hi,” she said, her voice less than enthusiastic.
“I’m sorry to bother you. You probably just walked in the door.”
“Sort of.”
“I was thinking about our conversation and something you said has me kind of curious.”
Not again. “Okay,” she said cautiously.
“When we were talking about the Death Valley storm, you said you’d checked to see if there were any planes in the area at the time.”
“There weren’t.”
“That’s what you said. But what made you check that?”
The question made everything stop, her heart, the traffic sounds, molecular activity, just for a second. “I don’t know. I just checked.”
“Were you looking for additional reports of the storm?”
Was I? “I don’t really know, Jake. Probably,” she replied, hearing the wariness in her voice. “I just checked it out.”
He paused and it wasn’t a reassuring pause. “Are you busy tomorrow? I’d really like to talk to you some more about this. I could drive up.”
Drive up here to talk? She stared at the phone. “I’m diving tomorrow. And it’s a five-hour drive from D.C. to New York. What’s so important?”
“How about Sunday?”
She frowned. “Well, yeah, I’m free on Sunday, but we could talk on the phone, Jake. It’s a five-hour drive,” she repeated, not liking the muddy churn in her stomach. “I mean, don’t you have better things to do?”
“No. We’ll probably be under voluntary evacuation by then anyway, so I’ll have to go somewhere. Give me your address. I’ll be there by noon.”
Friday, July 20, 7:30 P.M., Financial District,
New York City
Davis Lee rounded the corner to the elevator bank, not expecting to see anyone there at seven thirty on a Friday night. Most of the office had cleared out by six. The executives left for the Hamptons at noon, and the traders left at the closing bell for the Jersey Shore. The rest of the staff slipped out one by one as soon as their immediate bosses left.
“What are you still doing here?”
Elle looked up, startled and a little guilty. “Time just got away from me.”
“Bad habit to get into.”
She returned his smile but didn’t reply. He briefly considered checking his Blackberry for messages as a means to avoid a painful conversation, then decided against it. “Big plans for the weekend?”
“Not really,” she said, her gaze flicking back to the polished brass elevator doors. “I don’t really know a whole lot of people up here yet. I went out with Kate and some of her friends last weekend, but other than that, weekends have been a little boring.” She shot him a rueful smile and resumed staring expectantly at the elevator doors. “The natives would be appalled, but the truth is that there are only so many times you can Rollerblade around the Reservoir or go to MOMA or the Frick by yourself.”
He smiled sympathetically for a moment, saying nothing, wondering whether his radar was absorbing the right signals. She was either helplessly naïve or laying out bait, and there was only one way to find the answer. “Well, you should at least start the weekend on an easy note. Do you want to get a drink? I’m heading to Echo,” he drawled, naming the loud, bright, almost-hip bar in the building next door.
She looked up at him, unsure and grateful at the same time. “Are you sure? I mean, is it okay?”
Good Lord, girl, that’s troweling it on pretty thick. “It is if you’re over twenty-one and thirsty.”
“But I work for you.”
“Elle, don’t put too much thought into this. I might be Southern, but I’m fully evolved. And I’m not looking for trouble; I’m just looking forward to a good bourbon,” he said with a laugh. “You can join me or not.”
She blushed then and looked away as the elevator doors slid open. “I didn’t mean to imply—thanks, I’d love to have a drink.”
“That makes two of us,” he said, gesturing for her to enter the elevator car ahead of him.
She waited until the doors closed before looking up at him. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something, actually.”
He wanted to roll his eyes. Of course you have, darlin’. “Fire at will.”
“It can wait until we’ve ordered that drink,” she replied softly.
She smiled then, and Davis Lee found himself looking into a pair of blue eyes he didn’t recognize; they held an expression far removed from anything he’d seen in them before, and he wondered if he’d just walked into a well-laid trap. Letting out a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding, he realized that the night had just gotten more interesting and infinitely more dangerous. This girl was no baby.
Friday, July 20, 7:30 P.M., Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn
“Hi. Sorry I’m late,” Kate said as she opened the front door to her parents’ ground-floor apartment.
Kate’s mother looked up from her crossword puzzle, met her daughter’s eyes briefly, then glanced at the digital clock on the VCR in the corner. “Traffic?”
“No. Work. Traffic was fine. Everyone is already on their way to the beach,” Kate replied lightly. “It’s going to be a spectacular weekend. It might a little cooler by tomorrow, but the rain won’t start until tomorrow night.”
“So they say. You’re going diving in the morning, aren’t you?” Teresa Sherman pushed herself out of the faded easy chair and began walking to the back of the apartment.
Okay, so Plan C is the blueprint for the night, which means the lecture won’t start right away. After the last two years, Kate knew it was neither a small mercy nor a gift, just a tactic.
After all, delayed gratification is what martyrdom is all about. She winced as guilt instantly reared up and made her feel like a complete bitch. Taking a deep breath and resolving—again—to be more patient, Kate dropped her purse on the floor near the paperback-filled bookcase in the small living room and followed her mother into the kitchen.
“We shove off at five,” she groaned. “From Montauk Point. I’m going to have to get up at three to get there in time.”
“You should spend the night here.”
In the House of Fun? Thanks anyway.
Kate bit down hard on the inside of her cheek as penance for her inability to be reasonable for more than a nanosecond at a time. Let’s try it again.
She kept her voice light. “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to disturb you guys that early in the morning.”
From her place in front of the sink, her back to her daughter, Teresa let a small pause build before changing the subject to Kate’s second least favorite. “Miriam is moving out at the end of August. She’s in the upper front unit, the one we repainted last summer. I’m not going to start advertising it until next week. It’s yours if you want it.”
Her parents owned three small apartment buildings in their neighborhood and had been offering her vacancies since she’d moved back to the city after college. “No” wasn’t the answer they were looking for, and they never quit trying to change her mind. Kate forced a smile that her mother couldn’t see, then set her hands on her mother’s thin shoulders and gave them an affectionate squeeze. “Thanks, Ma, but no thanks. I still like DUMBO. There’s a Starbucks next door and I can bike to work when the weather is decent.”
Her mother shook her head and shot a look over her shoulder. “So you move in here and buy a cappuccino machine with what you’ll save on your monthly payment. The subway stop is a nice walk. You still get your exercise and your rent would be half what your mortgage is.”
“I
know.”
“So don’t move into this building. Move closer at least. You could buy a two-bedroom loft out here for what you paid for that shoe box.”
Would you drop it? “What can I say? I like shoes.” Kate dropped a kiss on her mother’s hair-sprayed head and moved to the fridge. A glass of wine was quickly becoming a necessity.
“Don’t be a smart-ass.”
“Hey, I learned from the best,” Kate replied, turning toward the hallway as she heard her father’s slow, slippered shuffle-and-squeak coming from her parents’ bedroom. A moment later, he came around the corner, pulling his wheeled oxygen tank behind him like a baby pulls a toy.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“How’s my girl?”
“A smart-ass, apparently.” She walked over and kissed his cheek, careful to avoid the tubes. “How are you doing?”
“Still causing trouble.”
“Glad to hear it. How did your doctor’s appointment go?”
“She wants me, I can tell,” he replied with a wink, sending a devilish grin toward his wife, who rolled her eyes and looked away.
Kate grinned. “Glad to hear nothing’s changed.”
“Well, she changed my meds. I’m going to start something experimental next week.”
Kate felt her eyebrows shoot up. “You’re kidding.” She looked from her father to her mother, who was looking over her shoulder again, wearing an expression that signaled an impending storm of extreme intensity and infinite duration.
Great.
“Don’t look at me for any information. I don’t claim to understand a thing he’s thinking anymore,” her mother huffed. “The stuff he’s on has been working fine.”
“God damn it, Terri, this new stuff might keep me out of a wheelchair for another few months,” Kate’s father snapped, his words ending with an involuntary wheeze.
Her mother turned around sharply, fire burning behind the tears in her eyes.
“Let’s talk about this a little later, okay?” Kate said hurriedly, before her mother could launch a counterattack. “Daddy, let’s go into the living room for a minute. Mom, do you need any help? I’ll be right back.” She gently steered her father out of the kitchen and got him situated in the one chair he could still get out of unassisted. “What’s going on?”
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